Filters still matter!

Filters still matter!

Black and white conversions are often troublesome: particularly if (like me) you don’t terribly like working in editing software! I like short cuts, and the one that I use most is Nik Efex, which does a range of useful things, but the relevant one here is a wide range of conversions to black and white. So here’s a second run at the subject, from a slightly different angle



To fill in the backstory: with black-and-white film, we always used to use filters to emphasis or reduce contrast. So a red filter made a blue sky go dark, throwing the fluffy white clouds into relief. Orange and yellow filters gave gentler versions of the look: a green filter darkens skin tones a little, and lightens foliage.



Nik Efex offers a range of off-the-shelf colour filters in the Silver Efex module for mono conversions, just like those old-fashioned camera filters. A red filter lightens red objects in the image, and darkens blue. A blue filter does the opposite, and so gives extra grit to mono portraits of men by emphasising every broken blood vessel and spot. Very simple – almost intuitive if you remember what filters did on film (and still do, by the way!)



It’s more complex if you are using Elements, Photoshop or another editor: particularly Elements. You have to play with the saturation of the different channels (red, green, Blue and contrast), and someone said the numerical values need to add up to 200, which isn’t helpful, as the values aren’t displayed in the dialogue box – only if you hover over a cursor!



Photoshop is simpler than that, as there are more colours, the numbers are shown, and while pushing things too far gives really bizarre results, it’s far more difficult to make the whole screen go black, though it is still far less instinctive for me, as a film user who knows a little about colour filters on the camera. They are still, just about, available, though they are hard to track down.

You can always just convert to grayscale, or desaturate – but you will almost certainly need to use Levels or Curves to restore decent contrast. When you look at a colour picture, colour contrast may give it a kick: in black and white, you almost always need the sparkle of white and some rich black shadows.



Robert51 set out a way to use Layers to give a sparkling B/W, but Elements 12 doesn’t have a yellow slider or an exposure slider – I don’t know if later versions have this feature. I am reminded, though, that there is still a way to get an older version of Nik Efex free – it has almost all the options that later versions have, and 99% of everything I do with it is catered for in that old version.



It harks back to a time when Google had bought it and didn’t know what to do with it, so it was free for a while, before DxO bought the rights and started developing it again. You can still download this version from DxO by filling in a form, but note that it comes without any support. That doesn’t stop it working, though!